UM atUM [S04-ep03]: The Race for Rare Metals

[Podcast] - Published on October 3, 2024 in Science and Society

This week on "UM atUM ": Roberto Interdonato, a researcher at the Tetislaboratory, talks to us about mining transactions. The report takes us to the nuclear magnetic resonance platform with Aurélien Lebrun. Then Thomas Pichery, UM sustainable development communications officer, talks to us about the Science Festival. A program broadcast every Wednesday at 6 p.m. on Divergence FM-93.9.

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And today we’re talking about a cognitive dissonance. A dissonance between a vision of our future selves—clean and green, where our electric cars and bikes don’t pollute, where our homes are heated by renewable energy that’s good for the environment, and where we can continue to consume the products of our industries without guilt because they have a near-zero carbon footprint.

Set against this image is the other one—the old, ugly one—that of our societies saturated with the black, dirty, toxic fossil fuels embodied by the coal mine in *Germinal* or by the gold mine and its rivers of arsenic. An outdated image, an image of the past.

And yet, the reality of the situation requires us—whether we are European, American, Canadian, Australian, Russian, or Chinese—to compare these two images in order to grasp the fact that the energy transition comes at a cost, and that we are not the ones paying for it.

Because our batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines have one major flaw: they’re energy-hungry. Lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, and aluminum are their guilty pleasures. And according to the Net Zero Emissions by2050 (NZE) scenario, demand for so-called critical minerals is expected to increase by 1.5 to 7 times by 2030.

And when you think of ore, you think of… mines. You can picture the dirty, ugly, toxic scene. The scene of arable land being seized, of hunger, of irreversible ecological damage, of child labor, of war.

Using open data, Roberto Interdonato of the Tetis Lab and his team have mapped the current transnational mining network linking investor countries and host countries to highlight distributional injustices and the unequal distribution of the social and environmental costs of resource extraction.

He published an article in the *World Development Perspectives* journal titled “Mining Resources: The Uncomfortable Truth of the Energy Transition.”